JIHAD EL SANA

We present a simple and accurate approach for aligning historical documents with their corresponding transcription. First, a representative of each letter in the historical document is cropped. Then, the transcription is transformed to synthetic word images by representing the letters in the transcription by the cropped letters. These synthetic word images are aligned to groups of connected components in the original text, along each line, using dynamic programming. For measuring image similarities we experimented with a variety of feature extraction and matching methods. The presented alignment algorithm was tested on two historical datasets and provided excellent results.